Tyler Crespin spent a sunny afternoon recently catching some air on his BMX bike in the skate park at Stephen Day Park.

Opened in 2005, the sprawling park near East Mountain View Avenue and County Line Road features a soccer field and other grassy areas, basketball and volleyball courts, a large jungle gym area, multiple picnic areas and wide sidewalks running throughout. There's also a paved and unpaved BMX/skateboard area.

"I used to go there 10 years ago," said Crespin, 20, pointing to Fall River Elementary, adjacent to the park. "Out here there was nothing. It was flat. We used to play out here in the dirt. When I was little that was awesome, but now I need a skate park."

A cyclist rides along the St. Vrain Greenway near Sandstone Ranch in Longmont on Friday, Feb. 8, 2013.
(Greg Lindstrom/Times-Call)

Stephen Day is but one example of Longmont's park system and the amenities the city has added over the years to allow residents more options for playing outside.

And if there was any doubt residents appreciate the city's adding more parks, bike trails and the like over the years, that doubt was set aside by the results of the city's recent biennial customer satisfaction survey, where 83 percent of respondents rated Longmont's trails "good" or "excellent."

The addition of more parks and trails partly reflects the city's population growth, but it also reflects changing attitudes among city leaders, who have listened and responded to residents' wishes.

"It's a nationwide movement, so there are a lot of discussions all over about making towns more walkable and ridable," said Buzz Feldman, who operated High Gear Cyclery in Longmont for 23 years before closing it in 2009. "Every survey shows that's what people want."

But not everyone in Longmont has always shared that spirit. Feldman said he recalls a period in the late 1990s where, "as a bike shop owner, I had seen the city take bike lanes off the street."

In 2003, he said, the League of American Bicyclists introduced its "Bicycle Friendly Communities" program and Longmont received recognition. It was the lowest level of recognition, bronze, but that the city was recognized at all was a point of pride, Feldman said. In 2012 Longmont was bumped up to the silver level of Bicycle Friendly Communities for the first time.

The league has also recognized two companies in town, Xilinx and Left Hand Brewing Co., for their friendliness to bicyclists.

Feldman continues to advocate for bicycling in Longmont, as does Bicycle Longmont, which boasts of hosting more than 200 free rides, events and programs each year.

Ryan Kragerud, the group's president, said the G'Knight Ride, an annual charity event that started in 2010, drew 2,300 people last year -- that includes riders and volunteers -- and he's expecting 3,000 this year. He also said that Bicycle Longmont's weekly Wednesday night family rides, which have been around for several years, topped 2,000 riders for the first time last year, with the largest single-night attendance topping out at more than 200.

Participation in the Venus de Miles charity ride has been increasing steadily in recent years, according to director Teresa Robbins. Its high point was 2,103 riders in 2011. That was down last year, she said, but it was the first year organizers mandated participants raise a minimum of $75 in pledges in addition to paying the entry fee.

Joggers enjoy an afternoon workout along the St. Vrain Greenway near Sandstone Ranch in Longmont on Friday, Feb. 8, 2013.
(Greg Lindstrom/Times-Call)

Dave Swenson, former owner of Bike-N-Hike, said the shop has supported the annual Bike MS ride for the past 16 years. The multi-day event has grown to more than 3,000 riders, he said.

Swenson said interest in cycling was limited in 1974 when he came to Longmont to work at Bike-N-Hike, then owned by his father-in-law.

"We had only the parks, plus the country roads," Swenson recalled. "We saw (mainly) people coming from Boulder back in those days -- there wasn't that much going on here.

"The choice that people had was to find safe routes around Longmont, which was tricky."

Swenson, who still works part-time at Bike-N-Hike, said he also can recall days when the term "bicycle friendly" would not have been applied to Longmont.

"No doubt," he said. "There were people who thought that a bike was a toy and that they got in the way of the cars. And some of the more arrogant bicyclists tend to perpetuate that."

Today, he said, he sees riders everywhere during the warm months. Some are riding recreationally, but many are using their bikes to commute to and from work.

"It's easier to get around," Swenson said. "That makes it safer and more enjoyable."

New Mexico to Wyoming, through Longmont

As more bike lanes were being added back onto city streets in the early 2000s, the St. Vrain Greenway was already well under construction. The first section was built as a donation to the city by the late Jimmie Kanemoto. That's the stretch of path that runs along the river between South Pratt Parkway and Main Street. The St. Vrain Greenway now stretches from just west of Golden Ponds all the way east to Sandstone Ranch.

"That's one of my favorite things to do is ride to Sandstone Ranch, go to the visitor's center, the old house (site of the Coffin homestead) and sit on a nice bench and watch the other people recreating," Swenson said.

Ultimately the St. Vrain Greenway will extend east to St. Vrain State Park and then continue into the Carbon Valley. Westward, the trail will extend to Pella Crossing at Hygiene. Both of those legs are expected to be completed in 2015.

"At buildout the trail becomes a regional trail," said Paula Fitzgerald, the city's parks and open space project manager. She explained that the St. Vrain Greenway is being incorporated into the Colorado Front Range Trail, which will ultimately stretch from New Mexico to Wyoming.

Much of the St. Vrain Greenway has been funded by Great Outdoors Colorado money, which comes from Colorado Lottery ticket sales. And the price tag for such a jewel running along the St. Vrain River through the city has been a hefty one. The cost per mile ranges from $300,000 to about $800,000, depending on a variety of factors, such as if the city owns the land or has to buy it, Fitzgerald said. Bridges add another $150,000 to $200,000 each to the cost and underpasses, such as the one that goes under County Line Road near Sandstone Ranch, can cost about $350,000 each.

Public input on parks

Stephen Day Park is an example of the city's neighborhood parks, designed to serve a particular neighborhood with a variety of amenities such as, in that case, a BMX/skateboard area. Longmont also has district parks, such as the Jim Hamm Nature Area and Roger's Grove, which focus more on natural areas and more passive recreation; and community parks such as Sandstone Ranch, which have fields and courts for organized team sports and are typically much larger complexes.

Neighborhood parks typically take about a year to build, though their planning and design phases can stretch out much longer. Community parks are done in phases over several years and can carry a price tag of up to $20 million, according to Kim Shugar, the city's manager of natural resources.

Parks are paid for through multiple revenue streams, including the parks improvement fee, funded by residential building permits; and the city's open space fund, put into place a dozen years ago.

The city's Public Works & Natural Resources Department is putting together a parks, recreation and trails master plan, which should be completed by July, Shugar said.

That plan will help guide her department's planning, including where parks should be added. But the public works department also solicits extensive public input, she said.

Plans include additional phases of development at Jim Hamm and Lake McIntosh and construction of a 10-court tennis complex at the Quail Campus.

Paying attention down to the pavement

Of course, there's more to being an outdoorsy city than just bike paths and parks. Long-timers such as Swenson and Feldman say they've seen the city change in a lot of other ways over the years.

Neither Lake McIntosh nor Union Reservoir used to allow outdoor recreation, and now both do. The ice skating rink at the pavilion in Roosevelt Park is a relatively new feature, and neither skate parks nor dog parks used to exist in Longmont.

Even sidewalks are something taken much more seriously than they used to be, noted Feldman, who sits on the city's Transportation Advisory Board.

Fay Reynolds -- a member of the city's Senior Services Board and who predated Feldman on the TAB -- said a focus of the board going back to the mid- to late-1990s was to make Longmont a more walkable city.

"One of the big things that we pushed was that there was a lot of city property, parks and other things that had no sidewalks," Reynolds said. "That's one of the things that we really pushed for."

New coordinator pushes Buffs to work, play at level he expectsJim Leavitt has discovered this much about his new defense at Colorado: He has some talent with which to work, but his players need to put it in another gear. Full Story

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